From here:

They’re lured abroad by visions of prosperity, by hopes for a better future for their kids and families back home. Sometimes, they’re trying to escape war or conflict. They are the some 12 million people around the world today who are believed to have become slaves for those dreams of a better, safer life.
But their number could be even double that ”“ as many as 27 million men, women and children to live in a state of modern slavery. People like Tara from Ethiopia, promised a good job as a maid in the Middle East, who finds her passport confiscated, and 20 hour days of humiliation and hard work. Or Umma from Somalia who spends her last pennies for a boat ride to Italy only to find herself an unwilling victim of the sex trade. Or Noben, a fisherman from Bangladesh beaten by his boss when he fails to meet his quota of catch for the day.
Among the growing number of lay and religious organizations combating these forms of human trafficking, is the Catholic International Union of Superiors General (UISG) which in 2009 instituted the Talitha Kum network to train consecrated religious and lay in methods of prevention and to provide assistance for victims of trafficking.
Salesian Sr. Estrella Castalone of Talitha Kum says the network takes its name from a center for trafficked girls she helps run in her native Philippines.
Through their many hospitals, schools and social centers around the world, Catholic sisters can play an important role in combating and preventing trafficking of persons and offering material, spiritual and psychological help to victims. And in the some 68 countries where it’s located, Talitha Kum is training more and more religious for the job. It’s a job, Sr. Estrella says, “that puts us in touch with all forms of poverty: the material, the spiritual and the moral”¦”

Listen to Tracey McClure’s whole interview with Sr. Estrella.

I do not envy our elected officials these days. They are faced with many difficult choices, with many pressures coming from different directions, with many asking for resources and many others trying to limit those resources.

In making difficult choices to reduce future unsustainable deficits, our leaders must keep in mind the plight of the poor, here and around the world. Those among us who have the least power and the greatest need should be at the forefront of their minds.

For me, this is a moral choice. My church asks that we ”” individually, as communities and as a nation ”” give special consideration to the poor, that we recognize our obligation to help those who are not just at the bottom of the ladder, but those who are below that, trying desperately to reach the bottom rung, constantly pushed down by forces beyond their control.

Read it all from the local paper.

The Rt Rev Justin Welby, Bishop of Durham, called for the Church to stand up for the world’s poor, when he addressed the Anglican Alliance for Development at Bishopthorpe, York, in a keynote speech called ‘Good News for the Poor – at home and in the wider world’ on Monday 30th April.

During his keynote address, Bishop Justin said: “The question that faces the church both domestically and internationally, is that of what is human flourishing, good news, amidst the deep poverty that still grips many parts of the world and the utter spiritual bankruptcy and increasing material poverty in slump hit Britain?

“Our good news must be unique, because the radicality of the gospel calls us to a sense of what we are doing and saying utterly different from all other groups. The language of our good news is not GDP, output and so forth, though they are part of the means, it is human flourishing in a context of love. The tools of our good news is the unique ones of reconciliation and peace, with its fellow travellers of generosity, community and self-giving love.

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…it is tempting for progressives to dismiss complaints about redistribution of wealth as ignorant or hypocritical, as in many cases they probably are. Yet all naïveté about public budgets aside, a strong presumption in favor of being able to keep the money you earn is a valuable and powerful thing. Progressives who embrace the concept of wealth redistribution on egalitarian grounds, or who join the refrain of “tax the rich” as the main solution to our fiscal and economic problems, tend to miss the many ways in which economic unfairness can remain untouched or even affirmed by redistributive policies….

It’s important to focus rhetoric and activism on making the rich “pay their fair share”””especially during this austerity season, in which the practical alternative is watching services for the poor dramatically cut….

This can’t, however, be the final analysis of redistributive policies. Throughout the Old Testament, inequality itself is hardly the only issue. There is also the question of fair access to the means of making a living””which, in the Old Testament world, means fair access to land ownership.

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On Monday, a 38-year-old geology lecturer hanged himself from a lamp post in Athens and on the same day a 35-year-old priest jumped to his death off his balcony in northern Greece. On Wednesday, a 23-year-old student shot himself in the head.

In a country that has had one of the lowest suicide rates in the world, a surge in the number of suicides in the wake of an economic crisis has shocked and gripped the Mediterranean nation – and its media – before a May 6 election.

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The new storehouse, which opened in January, is the centerpiece of the LDS Church’s intricate network for taking care of its members and lending a hand to others in times of natural disasters, putting scriptural encouragements into action in the aftermath of hardship, hurricanes, floods, fires and earthquakes across the nation and around the world.

“As I walk through, I [don’t] think, ‘What a beautiful building’ but how the Lord must truly love the poor to provide this building to take care of their needs,” [Richard] Humpherys said during a tour of the facility, built with members’ donations.

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Prelate of the Methodist Church, Dr. Sunday Ola Makinde, has described as ”˜careless and unguarded statement’ the comment made by American government that years of neglect and poverty led to the insurgence of Boko Haram sect in Nigeria.

Speaking at the weekend during the launch of a book titled “Women as Teachers and Character Moulders” written by Mrs. Ezinne Elizabeth Abimbola Makinde at Hoare’s Memorial Methodist Cathedral, Yaba, Lagos, the prelate declared the premises on which such a statement was based as poor research that lacks every credibility.

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With economic growth still anaemic and tax revenue down, governments are hoping that they can find additional funds by allowing more gambling.

In New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo is proposing to change the state Constitution in order to legalize commercial casinos.

In Michigan two separate casino development campaigns are under way to persuade voters, who have to approve new casinos, to allow a total of 15 new casinos across the state….

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The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that 45 million people in 2011 received Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, a 70% increase from 2007. It said the number of people receiving the benefits, commonly known as food stamps, would continue growing until 2014.

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In his address, the Archbishop referred to depending inequality, the invisibility of poverty and the cyclical nature of poverty.

Dr Sentamu said: “We are far richer today yet misery is growing. The current recession has led to significant cuts in public spending and services with more likely in the immediate years ahead. As well as the reality of poverty and growing inequality in our country today, we also face the problem of poverty of vision. Put simply, we have lost a vision of how we might transform our society to bring about changes that we wish to see.”

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The evolution of the rags to riches started five years ago with a vision held by a Jesuit seminarian who was assigned to a parish at the Payatas dumpsite, northeast of Manila; about 60,000 people live around the dump’s fringe. Father Xavier Alpasa said he saw exploitation flourishing as he ministered in this deeply impoverished community.

Women were buying dumpsite scraps that scavengers picked and sewing them into rugs to be sold commercially.

“Middlemen were coming in and buying the rugs at 9 pesos and selling them to department stores for 35 pesos,” Father Alpasa said. “Then I was asking, ‘Where did all the profit go? Why is it all going to the middlemen? How come the women would only get 1 peso as a profit?'”

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The Archbishop of Kenya has criticized idolatry of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) saying faith in Christ, not works performed in his name, is the path of salvation.

The 22 February 2012 letter written by Archbishop Eliud Wabukala on behalf of the Gafcon primates chastised Christians who in the pursuit of social and economic change, lost sight of the centrality of the cross and the primacy of repentance and amendment of life. “While it is obvious that such good things as feeding the hungry, fighting disease, improving education and national prosperity are to be desired by all, by themselves any human dream can become a substitute gospel which renders repentance and the cross of Christ irrelevant,” he said.

While the archbishop’s letter stands in contrast to recent Western church endorsements of the MDGs ”“ a series of 8 initiatives adopted by the U.N. member states that seek to address education, healthcare, and poverty issues ”“ the African church, not America is the focus of concern Anglican Ink has learned.

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An estimated 100 people have been killed in South Sudan in the latest of a series of ethnic clashes and cattle raids, officials say.

Jonglei state Law Enforcement Minister Gabriel Duop Lam told the BBC that at least 200 people had been injured.

The BBC’s James Copnall, in Khartoum, says these figures suggest the attacks were on a very large scale.

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Poverty has not been front and center in American political debate since the passage of the welfare reform act in 1996.

But a new book may have started to change that.
Conservative scholar Charles Murray, who created intense partisan conflict with “The Bell Curve,” his 1994 book on inheritance and intelligence, has now touched a nerve with “Coming Apart: the State of White America, 1960-2010.”

In it, he argues that there is a growing gap between highly educated, married, hardworking, affluent Americans and unmarried, less educated, chronically unemployed poorer Americans.

With one run of the printing presses, he has reignited the culture wars.

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Meanwhile, hidden from the public eye are a few people striving to live out St. Paul’s “more excellent way” of love. They don’t argue about poverty; they try to alleviate it. They’ve dropped out of the rat race, given up their possessions and taken new names.
They’re Catholic monks and nuns.
And while their commitment might seem radical, they could offer all of us ”” faithful and secular alike ”” a few timely lessons about devotion, generosity and genuine freedom.

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On April 21, the Episcopal Church will sponsor a forum on a critical topic: The Intersection of Poverty and the Environment. Originating from St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Salt Lake City, UT, the two-hour ecumenical forum will be live webcast beginning at 10 am Mountain (9 am Pacific, 11 Central, noon Eastern).

“Through The Intersection of Poverty and the Environment, we will explore the differential effects of environmental degradation and changing climate patterns on the poor ”“ in this country and around the world,” Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said.

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For most of her life, Hope Rubel was a healthy woman with good medical insurance, an unblemished credit history and a solid career in graphic design. But on the day an ambulance rushed her to a Manhattan hospital emergency room shortly after her 48th birthday, she was jobless, uninsured and having a stroke.

Ms. Rubel’s medical problem was rare, a result of a benign tumor on her adrenal gland, but the financial consequences were not unusual. She depleted her savings to pay $17,000 for surgery to remove the tumor, and then watched, “emotionally paralyzed,” she said, as $88,000 in additional hospital bills poured in. Eventually the hospital sued her for the money.

Yet that year the hospital, NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell, had already collected $50.2 million from the state’s so-called Indigent Care Pool to help care for people like Ms. Rubel who have no insurance and cannot pay their bills.

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…[a slum called Annawadi near Mumbai’s airport]… turns out to be a gray zone whose atomized residents want nothing more than, in Primo Levi’s words, “to preserve and consolidate” their “established privilege vis-à-vis those without privilege.” Even those who are relatively fortunate, Boo writes, “improved their lots by beggaring the life chances of other poor people.”

Describing this undercity blood sport, “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” (the ironic title is taken from the “Beautiful Forever” advertisements for Italianate floor tiles that hide Annawadi from view) does not descend into a catalog of atrocity ”” one that a defensive Indian nationalist might dismiss as a drain inspector’s report. The product of prolonged and risky self-exposure to Annawadi, the book’s narrative stitches, with much skillfully unspoken analysis, some carefully researched individual lives. Its considerable literary power is also derived from Boo’s soberly elegant prose, which only occasionally reaches for exuberant neologism (“Glimmerglass Hyatt”) and bright metaphor (“Each evening, they returned down the slum road with gunny sacks of garbage on their backs, like a procession of broken-toothed, profit-minded Santas”).
But “Behind the Beautiful Forevers” is, above all, a moral inquiry in the great tradition of Oscar Lewis and Michael Harrington. As Boo explains in an author’s note, the spectacle of Mumbai’s “profound and juxtaposed inequality” provoked a line of questioning: “What is the infrastructure of opportunity in this society? Whose capabilities are given wing by the market and a government’s economic and social policy? Whose capabilities are squandered? . . . Why don’t more of our unequal societies implode?” Her eye is as shrewdly trained on the essential facts of politics and commerce as on the intimate, the familial and, indeed, the monstrously absurd: the college-going girl who struggles to figure out “Mrs. Dalloway” while her closest friend, about to be forced into an arranged marriage, consumes rat poison, and dies (though not before the doctors attending her extort 5,000 rupees, or $100, from her parents).

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On Saturday night self described ‘Jill-of-all-trades’ Denesse McBayne devoted herself to her real passion– cooking.

“We’re not only feeding their bodies,” says McBayne. “We’re feeding their spirit.”

She spent the afternoon at the Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd whipping up a Caribbean feast to feed the members of the Family Promise program.

For one week, four times a year, a network of 16 churches throughout the Knoxville area take turns hosting homeless families of all sizes and descriptions.

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Through some basic analysis of census data, we can see what adopting the 180 percent [of the Federal poverty] line as the definition of poverty in North Carolina would have meant over the last nine years.

In every year since 2003, the number of North Carolinians under a 180 percent line hovers around 35 percent of the population, while the number of people falling below current poverty standards averages about 15 percent.

That is, the current poverty definitions show that approximately one in six people in North Carolina are in poverty. Using the more accurate 180 percent line would increase that proportion to one in three.

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We don’t want the cozy Christmas story besmirched by…tawdry human and political realities.

So we get youngsters to perform our nativity plays. We talk about how magical this season is. We say “Christmas is really for the children.” How … convenient.

But that’s not all you find, when you sit in a market square in Delhi and see adults performing the Christmas story in an open-air nativity play. There’s more. You see that Christmas is about people struggling, not just politically, but personally. Everywhere you look in the Christmas story you see people clinging on with their fingertips to life, to sanity, to respectability, to hope.

Read it all (my emphasis).

Go here and download or listen to it from the December 22nd morning show. I found it very helpful–KSH.

One in 45 children in the USA — 1.6 million children — were living on the street, in homeless shelters or motels, or doubled up with other families last year, according to the National Center on Family Homelessness.

The numbers represent a 33% increase from 2007, when there were 1.2 million homeless children, according to a report the center is releasing today.

“This is an absurdly high number,” says Ellen Bassuk, president of the center. “What we have new in 2010 is the effects of a man-made disaster caused by the economic recession. ”¦ We are seeing extreme budget cuts, foreclosures and a lack of affordable housing.”

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Nearly one in five clients of Christian rescue missions said they were victims of physical violence within the past year, a 6 percent jump from the previous year, according to a new survey.

“It’s quite possible that the uptick in physical violence … is due to a friend or family member’s feeling of desperation and helplessness accompanying their unemployment and underemployment,” said John Ashmen, president of the Association of Gospel Rescue Missions (AGRM).

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Social critics revile lotteries as state-sponsored regressive taxation because people buy lottery tickets disproportionately to their incomes–it’s a tax on the poor, in other words. The NASPL disputes that characterization, but research by economist Melissa Kearney at the University of Maryland shows that when state lotteries are introduced, they suck up 2.5% of household expenditures that would otherwise go to food, rent and things like children; the spending level reaches 3.1% when instant games enter the picture. But Kearney is not a lotto scold; she now sees lotteries as perfectly rational outlays, subject to the controls that would be imposed on vices like alcohol. “For the majority of lottery players, they are getting a bit of entertainment or consumption value,” she says. “Simply the fact that it isn’t a positive return doesn’t mean it’s an irrational choice….”

For the cash-constrained, says Kearney, “there is not another asset available to them to be life-changing. They have some chance that they are going to win a million bucks. So it becomes not a terrible proposition.”

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BOB ABERNETHY: One important lobby is the Christian group Bread for the World, which fights hunger here and abroad. Reverend David Beckmann, a Lutheran pastor, is president of Bread for the World. David welcome.

DAVID BECKMANN (President, Bread for the World): Thank you.

ABERNETHY: Bring us up to date, how many hungry people are there in the United States?

BECKMANN: It’s now 1 in 7 Americans who lives in a household that runs out of food.

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In what has become a pre-Thanksgiving tradition in the Charleston area, thousands came together for the annual “Feeding the Multitude” event to share fellowship and their cultures on Johns Island on Saturday.

Nearly 1,000 volunteers from more than 30 churches on Johns and Wadmalaw islands pulled together this week to provide a free Thanksgiving-style feast for nearly 2,000 in the fourth annual event at St. John’s Parish (Episcopal) Church. Volunteers also took meals to 200 people who are unable to leave homes and leftovers to Crisis Ministries.

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They drive cars, but seldom new ones. They earn paychecks, but not big ones. Many own homes. Most pay taxes. Half are married, and nearly half live in the suburbs. None are poor, but many describe themselves as barely scraping by.

Down but not quite out, these Americans form a diverse group sometimes called “near poor” and sometimes simply overlooked ”” and a new count suggests they are far more numerous than previously understood.

When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need. Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September. All told, that places 100 million people ”” one in three Americans ”” either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.

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[The] Rev. [Rankin] Wilbourne and his staff created an umbrella agency called Hope for LA in 2008. Since then it has partnered with 18 other programs around Los Angeles, some with religious affiliations and some without. Through Hope for LA, Pacific Crossroads members can choose volunteer opportunities that best suit their interests and strengths. One such ministry is Boxes of Love.

“We got the idea from Here’s Life Inner City, a ministry of Campus Crusade,” says the director of Hope for LA, David Kleinknecht, about the origins of Boxes of Love. “And as the economy went south and they had to cut back in L.A., we took on the coordination of mobilizing well-resourced churches to fill boxes and delivering them with the help of inner-city churches.” No coincidence: The founder of Here’s Life Inner City was Mr. Kleinknecht’s father, who also piloted the Boxes of Love program in New York City in the early 1980s (where it still functions under the name “Box of Love”)….

And so in a city more often associated with Calvin Klein, John Calvin’s teachings provide a basis for hope. In his commentary on II Corinthians 8, the 16th-century Swiss theologian connected Christians’ assurance of salvation with their freedom to give to the poor….

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Fixing a painful toothache isn’t in the budget of Brandon Crew, a 24-year-old maintenance worker and father to be.

Neither is food.

Earning $300 per week working at a local hotel, Crew said he and his girlfriend are barely “scraping by….”

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